Some have been driven over the edge. More than 200 farmers in Tamil Nadu have either committed suicide or died of sudden heart attacks between last November and May this year, NGOs estimate based on collated media reports.

Each of those deaths is a poignant case. Take this, for instance: 100km from Dakshinamoorthy’s village is Anaikudy, a village along the Kollidam River, a tributary of Cauvery that has run dry.

There, five-acre farmer S Selvaraju took his life early May, steeped in debt and remorseful that his attempts to dig bore-wells to tap ground water bore no fruits. Selvaraju, his son Karthi says, told him two days before his death that the river falling silent does not bode well.

The Cauvery River and her many tributaries, umpteen canals and channels have run dry due to a number of anthropogenic and climatic factors, says V Deivasihamani, a retired engineer of the Tamil Nadu Public Works Department with over 40 years of experience in irrigation management in the delta region.

The Cauvery, he explains, splinters into five major tributaries and hundreds of canals and thousands of channels taking waters from their massive catchment to every field and village across the delta.

This network of surface water streams irrigates the fields and recharges the water table. “If the Cauvery stops flowing, as she now has, can you imagine the consequences?”

His fears stand vindicated in a recently published study. Led by development economist and former professor of the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS) S Janakarajan, the study found nearly 20% of the cultivable land in the delta has turned into waste land in 40 years due to anthropogenic factors combined with climatic changes.

“The lands are being kept fallow due to paucity of water and adverse climatic condition,” Janakarajan noted in his study. While there has been an overall decline in the rainfall between 1974 and 2004, the study records an increase in the intensity of rain, often occurring in spurts, at the local level.

In 2016, the delta farmers could not cultivate even one crop due to rainfall failure and non-release of Tamil Nadu’s share of Cauvery waters by the neighbouring state of Karnataka where the river originates, owing to successive years of drought in the upper catchment, says Ranganathan.

Tamil Nadu receives 80% of its annual rainfall from the north-east monsoon between October and December. In 2016, not only did the usual south-west monsoon (July-October) fail, but the north-eastern rains also came a cropper. The total rainfall deficit was over 60%, according to the Indian Meteorological Department’s annual rain data. About 3.5 million hectares suffered from drought, according to the state agriculture department data. The rice production fell by half from its long term average.

The previous year (2015), the state produced about 8 million tons of rice out of a national total of 260 million tons.